I was browsing Waves' website in the wake of Black Friday and I noticed that they now offer "SoundGrid Systems." This setup is new to me and I was wondering if anyone was actually utilizing it. It seems the plug-ins cost 50% more just to have it "SoundGrid" compatible. I'm very ignorant but it just makes me think of Avid and the potential hardware black hole it could eventually lead to.

In 2006 I bought two Waves APA32 rack mount units essentially the predecessors to SoundGrid. What a friggin' waste of money. But it was a different time in computing where radical gains in desktop performance were happening every 6 months. I had these things connected to a Mac G4 running ProTools 6 with 2 TDM cards and Waves 5. Gosh it seems so silly now.

However if you're interested in distributed tools and workflows I'm currently using a Focusrite Rednet-5 which by using the Dante audio over ethernet solution allows me to network audio routings between 3 computers. I think waves SoundGrid is just one of many small custom solutions for networked audio systems I think there's a few more out there as well.

If you haven't tried it I recommend using a distributed tools / workflow on more than one computer system. I wince every time I see someone doing 'EVERYTHING' on one box.

I think the advantage of the Soundgrid system is not just that it allows for audio-over-ethernet (lots of systems do that), but that it allows you to offload your plugin processing to an external device. I don't quite know what the benefit of that is in a non-live setting unless you want to run huge sessions and don't want to use a pro tools hardware system.

Studio13, I'm also considering getting some Rednet gear for our studio. Would you mind sharing your opinions on it with me? (PM or off-site is fine)